


let it come down crashing

by giucorreias



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Andrew is a disaster gay, M/M, Though it's just a backdrop for pining and feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28189788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giucorreias/pseuds/giucorreias
Summary: Neil just sits there, drumming on the counter with his fingers, looking at Andrew with his too-bright, too-soft eyes.Or: Andrew pines.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 13
Kudos: 164
Collections: AFTG Exchange Winter 2020





	let it come down crashing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [donutdistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/donutdistress/gifts).



> This is for the aftg winter exchange!! I got donutsdistress. They had many great prompts, so I tried my hand at a flower shop AU (with a lil' dash of pining)!! I hope you like it!

Andrew doesn’t look up from his phone when he hears the door open — but that’s only because he’s sure he already knows who it is, and Neil is never a paying customer. Not since the first time, anyway, when he was looking for flowers to appease his scary friend, Allison, after he’d forgotten they’d agreed to meet. Instead, he keeps his eyes trained on the phone screen and scrolls further into his tumblr feed.

This is the part he’s seen, already, but Neil has an annoying (beautiful) face and Andrew thinks he deserves to wait just because of that. He waits one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and then — just as he’s liking a post he’s already reblogged — he says:

“You’re staring.” He doesn’t know, exactly, that that’s what Neil is doing, but if he takes into consideration Neil’s previous behavior, he’s pretty sure that he’s right. And, as he slowly takes his eyes away from his phone, he realizes he nailed it: Neil’s just standing there, elbows on the counter — carefully avoiding the cacti Andrew’s spread around just so he wouldn’t do this — and looking at him with those stupid, too-deep eyes of him. Ugh, Andrew hates him.

“Hey,” Neil says, instead of anything smart whatsoever. And then he  _ smiles _ .

Andrew considers and rejects many responses in the span of a few seconds, but Neil’s smile makes him stupid. He decides to go with a simple: “Neil.”

“Hey,” Neil says again. And then he sets something on the counter — the figurine of a cat with a painted face that makes him look angry, which looks exactly like Andrew’s own cat, King Fluffkins. Andrew loves it. It’s the exact kind of thing he would have bought for himself, so now he has to hate it on principle. “You know how I went to New York for that tattoo convention?” Neil asks. Andrew nods because he knows — he wouldn’t go as far as to say that he’s missed Neil’s inane conversation topics, but the last couple of days have been- long. Slow.  _ Boring _ . “I saw this on the airport, and I just thought of you.”

Andrew feels warm. He feels his whole self soften, and has to concentrate in order to maintain his face completely neutral. It’s not easy. He extends his hand and takes the figurine, brings it closer to his face so he can look at it properly (so he can avoid looking at Neil, lest he shows something on his face he’d much rather keep hidden). It’s small, and delicate, and pretty, and it’ll look perfect on his living room. He sighs.

“Thank you, Neil,” he says, and his voice lacks the monotony it usually carries. He can’t quite bring himself to mind — he knows that Neil won’t use it against him.

And that, as a matter of fact, is exactly the problem.

  
  
  


The first time Andrew sees Neil is not, exactly, the first time they meet: Andrew is opening the door to the shop just as Neil’s carrying some boxes from a van into the building just the other side of the street. Andrew spares him a second glance — because the boy is way too hot with his auburn eyes and tattoo-covered arms and Andrew is a weak, weak man — but then he forces himself to look away and get inside, because he has plants to water and arrangements to make and customers to serve.

It’s not until the afternoon, after Nicky arrives, that Andrew discovers who the guy is, and why he was carrying boxes around. Neil Josten, apparently, apprentice to some big-name in the tattoo world that Andrew isn’t familiar with, looking to open his own shop and trail his own path. Andrew can respect that, if nothing else.

The guy is good on the eyes, despite his terrible taste in clothes. Andrew doesn’t expect him to be anything else.

  
  
  


The first time they meet — really, officially meet, beyond looking at each other from their own respective sidewalks and nodding like proper, polite neighbors — is when Neil comes into the shop with wild hair and too-deep eye-bags, but still prettier than he has any right to be. Andrew looks up from his phone, where he’s been scrolling on tumblr for the last half hour, and has to do a double-take.

It’s ridiculous.  _ He’s _ ridiculous. He sets his telephone on the counter and raises one eyebrow, trying to look bored. “Welcome to Plant Parenthood,” he says, two years of customer service not enough to make him sound fake-pleased. “How can I help you?”

Neil sets his elbows on the counter, and leans forward a little bit — a scene Andrew would get to see several times, in the next couple of months, and that he might not have bothered with memorizing it so thoroughly, had he known. So thoroughly, actually, that he misses the next sentence Neil says, busy concentrating on the shape of his lips. 

When he asks the guy to repeat himself, he almost expects a smirk, a sign that the guy realized that Andrew had noticed how hot he was — but there’s nothing, not even a sign of annoyance.

Andrew rings him up, gives him the nice-customer discount because he can’t help himself… and then makes the mistake of asking him about his exy-related tattoo.

  
  
  


Now Neil is like a barnacle that can’t be shaken.

  
  
  


It’s not a bad thing, exactly. It might be, in fact, the opposite of a bad thing: Neil’s the best thing that’s happened to Andrew since he found out about Nicky and Aaron. It’s a fact of the universe that Andrew is not good with people, that he’s terrible at making friends. He’s not particularly patient, he has very clear boundaries that he demands are respected, and he doesn’t like giving people ammunition that can be used against him.

He understands, intellectually, that the world isn’t exactly a battlefield and that people aren’t out there looking to hurt him. Years in therapy have even taken him to a place where he trusts himself not to be a monster. But it’s still hard to trust that people won’t be careless with him — that they won’t betray him by underestimating the importance of respecting his space.

It’s easy to trust Neil. Fuck, it’s the easiest thing in the world. Neil has this… perfect understanding of the way Andrew is wired, and has never crossed any lines Andrew didn’t want him to cross. Neil gets him. And, unlike Andrew, Neil doesn’t have any problems with giving off ammunition that Andrew could use against him. It’s ridiculous, the way Neil is so open about his past and his fears and his wishes, the way he’s so easy with his smiles and his little, thoughtful gifts.

It makes Andrew want to ruin him, to protect him, to destroy anyone who has ever dared think of hurting him. They’re friends. Good friends. The very best of friends. 

(And Andrew is so in love with him it’s actually ridiculous).

  
  
  


“I missed you,” Andrew doesn’t say. He wishes he could, maybe, but he knows that saying those words would be the same as admitting something he doesn’t think he should. He feels like Neil hears them, anyway, for the way he pulls a nearby stool, sits on it, and carves himself a time in the middle of Andrew’s day. He asks, instead: “How was Kevin?”

By now, Andrew’s realized that Neil’s Kevin is the same Kevin that Andrew met when he worked as a barista, who used to draw his afternoons away and criticize his coffee. At that time of his life — before Nicky, before Aaron, before even Bee — Kevin had been something of a friend, always trying to get him to do something out of his talent for painting, even if he was annoying about it.

“Kevin was Kevin,” Neil shrugs, which tells Andrew exactly what he wants to know. Kevin’s always loud, always overbearing, and he doesn’t know how to be anyone but himself. It’s one of his best qualities. “He criticized all of my sloppy lines, and told me all the ways I could get better. He says I need more practice.”

Andrew raises an eyebrow. “Do you do anything at all with your life, besides working, practicing, and obsessing over Exy?”

“Well,” Neil smiles. It’s soft, and mysterious, and Andrew doesn’t know what it means. “Well, I often visit you.”

Andrew doesn’t know what he can say to that — to the implication that he’s as important to Neil as the most important things in his life — so he doesn’t say anything at all. Neil just sits there, drumming on the counter with his fingers, looking at Andrew with his too-bright, too-soft eyes. He doesn’t say anything else, either. 

Usually, Andrew’s fine with silence: he thrives on it. With Neil, silences have never been a necessity — not the way they are with other people. The two of them have traded harsh truths and sad childhood stories that would be much better if they’d been forgotten. Andrew’s long since figured out that there isn’t anything he could tell Neil that Neil wouldn’t take in stride — that he wouldn’t understand, that he wouldn’t  _ accept _ .

Lately, though, he’s felt like drowning under every word he can’t get himself to say. He’s never had to police himself, not with Neil, so he isn’t used to doing it. He doesn’t understand why it’s so hard. It’s not like he tells anyone else the things he tells Neil. It’s not like he’s an easier person to read, now, since he started sharing the deepest, most broken parts of himself.

It’s maybe the fact that he doesn’t like to feel like he’s holding back from Neil, when Neil’s always baring his own soul.

  
  
  


He’s just always distinctly aware of the fact that Neil doesn’t swing.

  
  
  


This is how things come to a head: it starts when Aaron tells him that he’s being an idiot, one morning at breakfast. Aaron hasn’t perfected the monotone I-don’t-have-a-care-in-the-world, so he sounds more irritated than careless. Andrew doesn’t try to pretend he doesn’t know what Aaron is talking about, despite the fact he’s pretty sure he hasn’t breathed a word of his feelings to anyone.

It’s uncomfortable, to realize someone knows him without his permission. That at some point since they met each other, Aaron learned him enough to realize he was in love.

“He loves you too, moron.” Aaron sighs as he puts down the cereal. Somewhere within the house, Nicky is loudly and aggressively flirting with his boyfriend in German, though both Aaron and Andrew are practiced at ignoring him at this point. “If I have to spend another afternoon with the two of you making moon eyes at each other, I’ll quit.”

If Andrew was anyone else, he might have answered “ _ you don’t even work for me _ ,” just so his brother could have the satisfaction of saying “ _ exactly _ ” and having the last word. As it stands, Andrew gets up from the table after sending a significant look towards the knives, then moves towards the door, keys jiggling on his pocket.

“Tell Neil I said hi,” Nicky says, having finished his conversation with his boyfriend. He shows up at the kitchen just as Andrew is shutting the door.

It’s nothing much, Andrew knows, just a stupid comment Nicky probably didn’t even think about, before making it. But it settles something inside Andrew, to know that it isn’t just him that expects Neil to show up at the shop today, with a bullshit excuse for his presence that no one believes anyway.

  
  
  


In the end, it’s the stupid way Neil looks at him, soft and full of feeling, as if Andrew was something _precious_ , that makes it so he can’t contain the words anymore. They spill out of him, like waves on a windy day at the beach. He says “ _I missed you_ ,” he says “ _I like you_ ,” he says “ _You are a_ _pipedream._ ”

Neil smiles, only, that mysterious smile of his, the one that Andrew will eventually learn that only happens around him, as he takes everything in. He pulls his stool closer to the counter, then leans his weight on his elbows, avoiding Andrew’s cacti expertly, before he opens his mouth. “Andrew,” he says, and his voice is low — intimate. “You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me. I think I’d be happy if I could spend the rest of my life just… close to you.”

Andrew looks away. Silence settles. This time, though, with all of his words floating between them, Andrew feels none of the desperation he felt before. Nothing threatens to come out. Neil drums his fingers on the counter, and Andrew lets himself feel- peace. Contentment.  _ Happiness _ .


End file.
